If you are reading this in 2056, I hope you are still making things.

It is 2026 and machines can make many beige things. They can write OK poems, compose generic songs, generate a face that has never existed and recreate the style of an artist who has been dead for a century. It is both fascinating and a bit depressing.

For women, much of that history happened outside what was formally classified as art. Creativity was embroidery and dressmaking, weaving and jewellery, decorating homes, passing down recipes, braiding hair and painting faces. Much of this disappeared from the official record precisely because it was domestic, decorative, or temporary.

And in 2026, that notion of the “official record” has taken on a strange new significance: we have built machines that learn from it.

I have worked around artificial intelligence since 2020, before most of us called it AI. For years, the conversation was about training – feeding enormous amounts of human knowledge and creative output into machines so they could recognise patterns within it. Now we are firmly in the age of using it, and AI can retrieve, synthesise and generate at extraordinary speed.

There is something fundamentally extractive about that: creating valuable technologies from human creative output without those humans necessarily knowing, consenting or benefiting. 79% of Australian authors are actively opposed to their work being used to teach LLMs. My hopeful prediction is that we will look back at this as the messy beginning, before copyright was respected and creators were properly recognised and remunerated.

There is another problem with the record itself. Machines don't know what's missing; they learn from what they're fed. If women's work, perspectives and creative lives were historically under-recorded, a machine trained on that history doesn't correct the imbalance, it repeats it. Which makes expressing and recording women’s lives now even more important.

For much of modern history, knowing things held enormous value. We built education systems, professions and economies around acquiring specialist knowledge and being able to recall, interpret and apply it. Now an extraordinary amount of accumulated human knowledge can be summoned in seconds. Knowledge hasn't stopped mattering, but access to it is becoming less scarce. When something becomes abundant, we tend to place greater value on what remains scarce.

Not the imagination that produces an image, the imagination that wants something enough to picture it. Creativity becomes especially visible when people want the world to change: protest movements have posters, songs, clothes, colours, slogans and symbols because creativity gives form to feelings and possibilities that don't yet have one.Before you can make a different future, you have to be capable of imagining one.

That feels particularly important for women in 2026; 29% of women-dominated fields are at greater risk of automation versus 16% of male-dominated fields, and we have every reason to interrogate this technology rather than accept it unquestioningly. But I don't think we should be afraid of using it either – women are extremely well practised at doing more with less. Despite an initial gender gap in AI adoption, senior women in technical roles now lead male counterparts in AI adoption by 12 – 16%.

Use it to remove drudgery, to learn something, translate something, test something or start something you couldn't afford to start before. Then spend that reclaimed time on things machines are much less interesting at: gathering, noticing, caring, making mess, changing your mind, developing taste, sitting around a table with other people and coming up with something none of you walked in with.

We like to imagine creativity as making something from nothing, but humans have never really done that. We collect, borrow, observe, collide and reinterpret, and rarely alone. Creativity passes between people and generations: a recipe altered by a daughter, a technique learned from a grandmother, a silhouette borrowed from another decade, a beauty ritual passed between friends. Creativity is relational.

Which is why the endless question of whether AI itself can be creative feels slightly beside the point. Of course a machine can produce something we might describe as creative. Ask one for a new Frida Kahlo and it can give you something remarkably convincing. Frida Kahlo herself would have had quite a lot to say about that. A machine can recognise and reproduce the patterns of her work; it never lived the life that made her choose them. Ai-Da, a humanoid-robot artist, sold an AI-generated image of Alan Turing titled ‘A.I. God’ for US$1,084,800 at auction.

Taste is difficult to separate from the person exercising it. It is knowledge, certainly, but also biography: the strange book your mother owned, the lipstick someone wore when you were six, the city you grew up in, the music you loved at 17, the painting you couldn't stop looking at. Beauty may be one of the most democratic places we practise it. You don't need to call yourself an artist to borrow, combine, exaggerate, reject and reinvent, sometimes for others, sometimes entirely for ourselves.

Imperfection tells us there is a person inside the thing. There is humanity in the thumbprint left in clay, the visible brushstroke, the badly sewn first dress, the lipstick worn in a way nobody recommended – proven humanity, the authenticity premium. In a 2024 study, 79% of students said they would pay more for work they perceive as human-made. At the very moment machines can make more for us, we seem to be rediscovering the pleasure of making something slowly, imperfectly and unmistakably ourselves.

Imagination, connection and taste are three names, I think, for the same thing: the maker, the person who wanted something enough to picture it, who borrowed and was borrowed from, whose experience leaked into every choice, whose pursuit was messy, cumbersome and very necessary. That’s what's hardest to commodify. Not the output but the person behind it. A machine that closes the gap between desire and output closes off the very space where a maker becomes one.

So, how creative do we feel? Restless, I think. Perhaps even hungry. We are surrounded by more words, images and information than any humans before us, while rediscovering the desire to make, touch, gather, choose and leave our own mark. That doesn't feel like a coincidence.

By the time you read this, the argument about whether AI can be creative may feel quaint. What interests me more is what you can learn about us from what we chose to make.

Because what we create tells future generations what we loved, feared, found beautiful, fought against and imagined could be different. So, future reader, I hope we left you plenty to find.